The Ties That Bind: Low Morals, High Deception, and Dark Creativity

ABSTRACT

Self-reported dark creativity has been related to lower concerns for all moral foundations, especially among those with dark personality traits. The present study aimed to extend these findings using real-world divergent thinking tasks with ethical and unethical instructions. Data (N = 1346, males = 388, females = 840, M_age = 20.93, SD = 5.48) were collected on creative performance, moral foundations, and dark personality traits, including trait deceptiveness. Divergent thinking responses were coded for fluency, flexibility, creativity, goal-directedness, deception, moral valence, and a virtue caveat (where participants explicitly denied to give unethical responses). Results indicated that for both ethical and unethical tasks, lower binding foundations (loyalty, authority, purity) were associated with higher creative performance, whereas higher concerns for moral foundations were related to more noble and positive responses and lower deception used in responses. Among dark personality traits, only trait deceptiveness was a significant mediator between low binding foundations and high creativity. Contrary to our predictions, none of the Dark Tetrad traits were significant mediators. These findings reinforce the salience of deception in the process and outcomes related to dark creativity; implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Dark Tetrad
• deception
• divergent thinking
• malevolent creativity
• morality
• moral foundations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the OSF repository: https://osf.io/awf9e/?view_only=28fc3d87e2dd456ba761909c8d0f659e

Ethical approval

The study received ethical approval from the Institutional Review Boards at University of Nebraska Medical Centre (#701–20-EP) in February 2021, Monk Prayogshala in March 2021 (#052–021), and the University of Connecticut in August 2021 (#X21–0156).

Pre-Registration

The study was pre-registered on OSF: https://osf.io/83swq/?view_only=8f6e45d742c24a15baeab17090f7800c

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2024.2306447

Notes

1. In this paper, we use the term “dark creativity” in alignment with more recent scholarly discourse that broadens the scope beyond intentions of harm to encompass a wider range of ethically ambiguous creative acts (Kapoor & Kaufman, 2022a, 2022b). While Cropley, Kaufman, and Cropley (2008) indeed defined “malevolent creativity” as creativity intended to cause harm, subsequent research has expanded this concept. Just two years later, the first edited volume on this topic was called “The Dark Side of Creativity” (Cropley, Cropley, Kaufman, & Runco, 2010). The term “dark creativity” is used to capture not just the intent to harm but also creative endeavors that, while innovative, may have ethically questionable or unintended negative consequences such as those designed to achieve self-serving goals (see also negative creativity; Clark & James, 1999). This shift in terminology reflects an evolving understanding of the complexity of creativity in moral and ethical contexts, acknowledging that not all creative acts with negative outcomes are driven by malevolent intentions.

2. https://osf.io/83swq/?view_only=8f6e45d742c24a15baeab17090f7800c

3. This hypothesis was tested using planned mediations; this was a deviation from the pre-registration.

4. RQs 1, 2, and 3 were not included in the pre-registration.

5. Some of these alpha values for specific subscales of the moral foundations measures were relatively low (i.e., below .60). However, these individual scales were not used in analyses; instead, the individualizing and binding moral foundations indices were used.

6. In the pre-registration, this was presented in the reverse order (noble = 1 to evil = 6); however, this was changed so that higher values would be interpreted as greater moral valence.

7. Note that participants in the US responded to different links with slightly different demographic questions (e.g., income ranges in USD) as compared to participants in India (e.g., income ranges in INR). Data was merged across surveys.

8. Guided by theories positing that early-formed moral foundations influence personality development, including traits like deceptiveness (Damon, 1990; Haidt & Graham, 2007), our study uses mediation models to clarify the relationships between morality, personality, and malevolent creativity. The goal was to explore how morality (the IV) and personality traits (the mediator) account for variations in malevolent creativity (the DV), rather than to establish causality, which is challenging with cross-sectional data (Maxwell & Cole, 2007).

9. The latter result was likely a spurious one; in a subsequent model, when MFQ binding (which was negatively associated with deception) was removed, MFSS binding was no longer significant (which was earlier positively related to deception). Further, bivariate correlations between the use of deception under both ethical and unethical instructions and binding foundations (MFQ, MFSS) were negative (r = −.10**).

10. Drawing on a helpful reviewer suggestion, dark creativity was quantified by creating a multiplicative index of creativity and moral valence, i.e., multiplying the scores of creativity and moral valence (D. Harris, personal communication, February 14, 2015). Before this calculation, we reverse-coded the moral valence scores (noble = 1 to evil = 6) to mean that higher scores correspond to more malevolent or immoral responses. Higher scores on the index imply greater dark creativity.